Thirteen Crucifixions 5

Here is the latest from my novel.  I have noticed that my readership in Russia has grown since I began posting Thirteen Crucifixions and if the gay subtheme is encouraging the BLTG community in that country, especially with that dreadful President Poutine (oops, Putin) then so much the better!

 

Stephen Bloom was forever burned into his memory.  Skeletally gaunt and already marked with the purple lesions of Kaposi’s Sarcoma, Michael still could tell that he’d been unmistakably handsome before falling ill.  They loved each other, and for years afterward, Michael made do with having an on again and off again affair with Stephen’s surviving companion, Pierre, who was fortunately free from the virus, and most unfortunately had been a favourite of Michael’s father.  He only learned this after his father’s death, when Pierre, drunk and indiscreet, told Michael considerably more than he should have, which also began the lengthy end to the sexual aspect of their relationship.  He had taken in stride the news of his father’s homosexuality, having actually known this several years before Frank Watson’s deathbed disclosure to the family.  Father and son had each remained taciturn, mutually distant, as though sharing in common a mutual preference for men, and sometimes the same men, had strewn between them just a few too many landmines.  Since they had never been close, Michael was surprised at how profoundly he felt the loss of his father.  For months afterward he had to struggle against feeling that he himself had actually killed him.

            He lay down to rest on the bed that once had been his sister’s, and wondered what had become of Persimmon Carlyle, who actually looked rather like Suzanne.  Michael himself could no longer write.  His investigative journalism over the reputed police misconduct during the APEC riots had led to his being strip-searched, interrogated and manhandled, particularly by one Officer Crawley.  Michael, professed anarchist that he was, did like men in uniforms.  Officer Crawley, all handsome and gleaming muscles, had coerced from Michael, while strip-searching him, a blow-job, and threatened him with further unspecified consequences if they didn’t continue to meet together.  Michael lost his ability to write.  After six months, or so, Officer Crawley stopped summoning him for weekly sex.  Now Matthew, who knew nothing about what had transpired between Michael and Officer Crawley, had also abandoned him.  He still fantasized regularly about Officer Crawley, while remaining altogether traumatized from his sexual abuse.  He could not stop obsessing over those rippling muscles of his, contained in skin that gleamed like Michaelangelo David white marble.  Michael had a fetish for authority?  He was a closet Brownshirt?  A weasely little fascist?  Why not?  He had continued to live with Matthew, who was an apolitical and reactionary bourgeois who kept him safely housed and fed and loved while Michael attended meetings and rallies and wrote horrible things about the very establishment that sustained and subsidized him.  He had never been in denial about his hypocrisy.  Just now, as his limbs grew heavy underneath the counterpane on Suzanne’s bed, was he actually starting to feel remorse about the way he’d been living.  Instead of rising to the challenge of finally becoming independent, he had gone running back to his mother, back to his natal home.  At the age of thirty-seven.  Stephen, Pierre, Persimmon.  Officer Crawley, his father, Matthew.  Their faces all whirled together in kaliedescopic disharmony as he closed his eyes and breathed in the fragrant air.  He didn’t intend to stay here long.  He actually was going to take the leap, make the determined effort of living alone, independently, like a mature adult, without props.  If he wisely invested his share of the sale of the townhouse, then he would surely be comfortable for the rest of his life.

            Michael had conducted with Stephen Bloom two consecutive interviews over as many days.  The month was June, the year 1990.  Eleven years ago.  The day was slightly overcast, providing a marbled sky that spanned across the earth like an enormous blue and white agate.  It was a sumptuous house, one of the most palatial structures in Shaughnessy Heights.  It was a Tudor-revival monstrosity of some thirty rooms, or so, set on an acre estate on the edge of the hill.  The terrace they sat on had the dimensions of an average-size café, looking over rose-beds in full fragrant view.  Persimmon and her news cameras wouldn’t be appearing till the following day, allowing Michael to have Stephen and Pierre to himself.  Having seen photos of Stephen while he still had his health, Michael could appreciate the narcissistic quality of his relationship with Pierre.  They could have been brothers… twins.  They had first met while they were both teenagers on the street.  Shephen had just fled to Vancouver from his adoptive parents—Okanagen cherry farmers—and the sexual mishandling he’d received of their twenty-year old son.  This was where he had ended up after a childhood of being shunted between foster homes.  Stephen’s origins had been for himself a mystery until four years earlier, just eighteen months before he was diagnosed.  That was when he learned that the owner of the mansion, Pamela Newtonbrook –Jones was his birth mother.  Her unbelievably wealthy husband had just died, and she had begun a search for her son, whom she had conceived resulting from a discreet affair with an Anglican Priest during the early Sixties.  During this time, her husband had been conveniently absent while on a prolonged trip to South Africa.

            Pamela’s husband, Lawrence, was elderly and moribund.  For reasons he cared not to disclose to his wife, he did not want to die at home, nor in hospital.  Pamela leased a luxury condo that overlooked Stanley Park, where she installed her dying husband with a resident caregiver.  Pamela had married Lawrence in England during the war, she a child bride of eighteen to a tycoon already in his forties, while the Luftwaffe rained down

bombs and fire upon London.  He was already the wealthy heir of a shipping magnate, and was already augmenting his fortune through weapons manufacturing—later it had come out that the Germans, as well as the allies, had been his preferred clients.  They, Pamela and Lawrence, had met three years earlier under scandalous auspices at a secluded beach near Cornwall where she had encountered him when he was sunbathing in the nude.  It was then that he struck up with Pamela’s father, a greengrocer, a friendship, which in time won him her hand in marriage.  Following the war they settled in Vancouver, where Lawrence had shipped over from the family estate in England a stone fountain of a satyr, next to which he planted an intricate holly maze.  Michael could see these features from the terrace, and later, Pamela took him for a tour of the holly maze.  It was in the circle clearing in the centre, which had a huge stone sundial, where Pamela and Michael had sat together on a bench, in order to proceed with her part of the interview.  She was a handsome woman in her early sixties, resplendent in a gold and purple caftan, her tanned arms adorned with bangles.  There, she told Michael the dreadful secret of this holly maze, which she herself had only recently learned from her daughter, Martha Newtonbrook-Jones, the novelist.  For several years her father would take her on an insidious game of hide and seek where, until she was twelve, he would systematically rob her of her childhood.  Pamela had thus finally understood why Lawrence could not bear being near the scene of his crimes against his child, while he lay dying and facing his own eternal reckoning.  Martha had since written and published a controversial memoir of her ordeal of father-daughter incest.  Only recently had Pamela been reconciled to her daughter, who now lived with her in the mansion.

            While Pamela was nursing her husband, she had taken a fancy for long walks in the neighbourhood, which would invariably lead her into the cafes along Davie Street.  She had lived so long sheltered from the street, from the poor, and from the denizens of the various underclasses from which her station in life had solidly protected her—she was hungry for adventure.  She wanted to slum?  She would sit inside a cheap greasy spoon surrounded by street people, homosexuals and drag queens, knowing not in the slightest how to relate to any of them.  Yet, feeling a connection.  She struck up an acquaintance with Stephen and Pierre, who also seemed flattered by her attention.  They looked familiar to Pamela, almost disconcertingly familiar, particularly Stephen.  While Lawrence was drawing his final rattling breath, she realized why: this young Stephen Bloom looked exactly like the father of her son, whom she had given up at birth!

            In the presence of the stone sundial in the heart of the holly maze, Pamela continued to tell Michael of a particularly lengthy trip of nearly two years that her husband had taken to South Africa, ostensibly on business.  Later, it had come out that one of his companies had been arming the apartheid regime against black insurgents.  She went for a trip to a town in the interior where lived friends of hers.  She met Michael Crawford, the young rector of the local Anglican parish.  One thing led to another.  She was an Anglican, she felt lonely, abandoned.  Confused.  Even traumatized, and there was handsome young Michael Crawford, all compassionate understanding.  They were soon making love on the sly, and Pamela, shortly afterward, learned that she was pregnant.  She was almost forty, Michael Crawford was twenty-seven.  She told him nothing.  Returning home she made arrangements with the servants, instructing them that she would be gone till the following November.  Then, incognito, she took residence in a solitary cabin in the bush, some sixty miles from the town where her friends lived.  They knew nothing.  She hired a young native woman to help her and give her companionship.  This young woman, when Pamela’s time had come, brought over her mother, the band midwife.  At Pamela’s request, they took the baby with them.

            Twenty-three years later, on meeting Stephen, it was for Pamela like seeing all over again the Reverend Michael Crawford.  She asked Stephen some questions, learning that he had spent his first two years on an Indian reserve.  He wasn’t sure which one, as he was too young even to remember being apprehended by the Children’s Aid authorities.  But when he described the area, she was satisfied that she was on the right trail.  It was learning his birth-date—October 31, 1962—that finally had convinced Pamela that she was indeed talking to her son.  Soon, Stephen and Pierre, unable to pay their rent, were facing eviction, and Pamela invited them to come live with her.

            This was in 1986, during Expo, which was drawing in visitors from all over Canada, as well as the rest of the world.  Pamela became re-acquainted with Michael Crawford, now divorced from his wife.  He wanted to meet their love child.  He also ended up living in the mansion.  Others came, under the auspices of establishing an ecumenical religious community and AIDS hospice.  From the very beginning, said Pamela to Michael, things had taken their own momentum.  She had planned nothing, she had organized nothing.  Michael himself had to admit that this place had a nearly palpable presence.  In the aftermath, the courts could do nothing, as it had been satisfactorily proven that the terminally-ill residents had all, voluntarily and without co-ercion, given up their medications and treatments.  Said Stephen to Michael, “We are simply in a hurry to get home.  We’re finished here. Now God is waiting for us.  He is waiting for me, Michael, and I have been told in a vision that in two days I shall be home.  We will not see each other again.  But I shall be with you.  And, please, watch over Pierre.  He loves you.  Goodbye, Michael.  After two days, that’s it.  I’m gone.  I’m home with Jesus.”

            That was Michael’s last image as he sank into torpor beneath his sister’s counterpane, the shining eyes and beatific if emaciated smile of Stephen Bloom bidding him farewell.  Then he remembered nothing, until a rough hand on his shoulder shook him violently awake.  Michael looked up, tracing the hand and the muscular forearm to none other than Officer Crawley.  He was surrounded by three other big cops.  He didn’t appear to know that it was Michael, not even as they escorted him down both flights of stairs, out through the front door, and down the front steps where his mother stood slack-jawed.  “Hi, Mom!” Michael said as he burst out laughing.

            “Let him go!” Sheila was suddenly shrieking.  “Let him go, at once!  He is my son.  Let him go, I said!  He’s my son.”  Officer Crawley opened his mouth in protest.  “Never Mind!” Sheila yelled, “There’s been a horrible mistake.  This is my son.  He lives here!”

            The other policemen had already released Michael.  Reluctantly, Officer Crawley did likewise.  “You’re not laying charges?” he asked stupidly.

            “Of course I’m not laying charges.  This is Michael Watson.  My son!”

            He looked at Michael in sudden, startled recognition.

            “Long time no see, Officer Crawley,” Michael said, smiling.

            To Sheila, Officer Crawley turned slowly.  “Then it looks like you won’t be needing us after all.”

            “I’m terribly sorry,” Sheila said.  “I made an awful mistake.  You see, I wasn’t expecting him to arrive until Saturday.”

            “Then how did he get in the house?”

            “He has a key.  All my children have keys.  What kind of mother would I be if they didn’t?”

            When the police left, Sheila looked hard at her son and told him, “You left the front door wide open.  How was I to know it wasn’t a burglar.”

            “So you called the police on your own son.  Nice work, Mumsy.”

            “Never mind.  I’m sorry.  Let’s go inside, shall we?”

 

            They sat at the kitchen table, drinking scotch out of tumblers.  The gray arborite and chrome table, with the liver-red vinyl upholstered chairs, had been with the house longer than Michael had been alive.  Even though the walls had been repainted many times since, they still wore the same creamy yellow of his childhood.  A new, larger fridge, white.  The same gas stove, still immaculate.  Linoleum squares of black and white gave the floor the appearance of a chessboard.  A cuckoo clock and one of his mother’s water colours of the apple tree and garden in the back yard, alone adorned the walls.  A microwave oven on the counter was the single token of technological modernity.  Looking at his glass of scotch, Michael said, “So, what’s the special occasion?”

            “You’re here,” his mother answered.

            “That’s special?”

            “It’ll have to do.”

            “It’s been a while since I’ve had good scotch.”        

            “You know one of those police officers.”

            “Yeah.”

            “Is there a story there?”

            “No.”

            “Michael.”

            “Do I have to tell you everything?”

            “I didn’t like his way of looking at you.”

            “I can’t believe that I left the front door open.”

            “It isn’t like you.”

            “I was tired.”

            “Where were you?”

            “I was sleeping in Suzanne’s room.”

            “You can have your old room back anytime.  I’m getting tired of climbing all those stairs.”

            “I like Suzanne’s room.”  He almost said, piquishly, that he’d always wanted his sister’s room, that she always got whatever she wanted for being the girl in the family, and then Michael, knowing how untrue that was, squelched the thought.

            “Where did you get these beautiful glasses?” he said.

            “Wedding present.”

            “You never used to take them out or—“

            “The other wedding.”

            “Do you ever see him?”

            “Today.  He came into the Westwind.”

            “Was he rational?”

            “This time he wasn’t bad.  So, Michael, tell me please what happened.”

            “Matthew sold the townhouse without telling me.  Now he’s in some religious commune on the Island.”

            “And what have you been doing?”

            “Nothing.  I’ve been staying in a hotel.”

            “You could have come here.”

            “I don’t know, I don’t know what happened.”

            “What are you doing about money?”

            “Matthew left me two hundred thousand on the sale of the townhouse.  I’m not going to starve.”

            “That is a lot of money.  Are you going to invest it?”

            “Probably.”

            “That’s very generous of him.”

            “To say the least.”

            “You know you can stay for as long as you want.”

            “Thanks.”

            “But what are you going to do with yourself?”

            “I don’t know.”

            “Are you writing?”

            “No.”

            “Michael.”

            “I can’t.”

            “What happened?”

            “Since APEC, it’s all gone to hell.”

            “That cop.”

            “Officer Crawley.”

            “What happened?”

            “Mom, is it okay, please, that I don’t tell you?  At least not now?”

            “I will respect your privacy.  So, what was it about APEC?”

            “The police didn’t like what I wrote, that they were beating and detaining and strip-searching non-violent protestors.  I was one of them.   All the stuff in the papers about women being strip-searched by the pigs—it wasn’t just women.  Me, I’m the only male who got strip-searched.  It wasn’t till after that they knew that I was a journalist.  So, Officer Crawley took a fancy for me, if you know what I mean.  For six, seven months, we got together for—for sex.  He also informed me that if I informed on him, or told anyone that I’d been strip-searched, and sexually humiliated, that they had ways of permanently silencing me.  Two years later, I still can’t write.  Now Matthew’s gone… So what else would you like to know.”

            “I’m sorry.  I knew you didn’t want to tell me.  I should have respected that.”

            “Next time maybe you’ll figure out that you’re not always going to like hearing about what someone wants to stay quiet about.”

            “Okay.  Mea culpa.  Have you eaten?”

            “I’m not really hungry.”

            “When did you eat last?”

            “Yesterday.”

            “Michael.”

            “I forgot to eat.”  For nearly three weeks, Michael had been living in a state of no-time.  Not having a watch—he refused to wear one on principle—he simply forgot what time it was.  The hotel he checked into was an inexpensive bed and breakfast with a pub downstairs near the library.  His room was clean, small and spartan.  He needed nothing else.  He hadn’t planned this.  He had realized this much—that townhouse, without Matthew, crammed as it was with antiques, was an Edwardian museum that forbade Michael another day of dwelling there.  It was no longer his.  Why hadn’t he gone directly to his mother’s?  He hadn’t really thought of it?  Well, no, he hadn’t. He was in shock?  He packed only essentials—toiletries, a few changes of clothing, certain books.  Little else.  He might easily have booked a flight to… anywhere.  He hadn’t thought it.  When he left the townhouse Michael went walking, over the bridge, downtown. He had lived all his life in Vancouver, but he had never really lived here?  Alone.  As Michael Watson.  That was his name.  His name?  He had not chosen it.  Watson was the name of his father, the man who had sired him, suggesting that Michael was an owned property.  He was a “Watson.”  “Michael and “James” were names given him by his mother, thus stripping him of any essential self-ownership.  He didn’t have any self?  If so, then what made him a being separate from his mother, his father, each of his siblings?  The thought of himself, for Michael, not even summoned forth for him any of his given names.  All he imagined himself to be was an impenetrable gray fog, with no promise of any light hidden within.

            So Michael had passed the three weeks.  Never knowing the time, he could be waking or sleeping at any time of day or night, spending his time endlessly walking, before slumping into a café chair in any neighbourhood of Vancouver, footsore, exhausted, recharging his nervous energy on coffee, whatever menu item he might fancy, though as often forgetting to eat.  His wanderings outside, taking him through parks, along streets shaded with trees, or past lovingly kept gardens brought to his attention as though for the first time the new spring taking fresh possession of the earth, in flowers, budding leaves, birdsong.  He had never before noticed the robins, their clear, clean and pure singing.  Then he would pass through a shopping mall, or an industrial district, or a slum, then past the junkies and drug-dealers and crack head whores, then through Chinatown, Gastown—already mobbed with early tourists—then back to respectable downtown, another café, with loud techno music and hip, bored-looking young servers, where he would read D.H. Lawrence, or Andre Gide—he hated most contemporary writing—and observe from his table the follies of socializing yuppies and alternative young people, set off by the trees outside bursting into tender green beneath a sky of myriad shades of blue, gray and gold.  None of their conversations held his interest.  He found other people dreadfully boring. With Matthew gone, Michael had no friends, apart from Pierre, his living connection to Stephen Bloom.

            Even though he’d grown up in Vancouver, Michael had never lived here.  Even though he’d lived here all his life, he still didn’t know Vancouver.  He had never allowed himself, until now, sufficient solitude for knowing anything.  Outside of his profession, and the myriad subjects of interest he could write and expound on, and all these lives in interviews he could live through vicariously, now was he coming to accept that for himself, Michael James Watson, whose three given names did nothing to define nor describe him, the vocation of journalism was chosen simply that he might enjoy from a safe distance the vicissitudes and strange multiple occurrences of life.  It was almost like seeing live TV, or a video.  The political convictions and social values of the left he’d learned on his mother’s knee he had pretended to live out in the comfort and compromise of his arrangements with Matthew.  He was nothing but a bourgeois hypocrite.  He didn’t miss journalism, but he did want to begin keeping a personal journal.  Perhaps now, that he was back at his mother’s, back “home.”

 

            He was on his second bowl of chili. Alone Michael sat in the kitchen.  Sheila had gone up to bed, after watching tv with her son.  She made fabulous chili, Michael’s mother.  He wanted to explore the house, before retiring, every room, but for his own, where his mother now slept.  It was five after ten.  Rather strange to be noticing the time again.  Now that he had money, and no obligations, he hoped he could settle into a life that was not governed by the clock.  He was thinking of his father, long before his death, when Michael, a youth barely eighteen, came home to Matthew, only to find his father drinking tea in the living room.  Were you looking for me?  Michael had asked him.  No, he said, with an embarrassed smile.  I’m visiting my old pal Matthew.  It was a summer evening, late, dark and still warm.  Michael could hear the shower running.  He ensconced himself in the chair opposite his father, and looked at him long and hard.  Michael looked very much like Frank, who was still very handsome and desirable, though well into his forties.  Handsome and desirable?  Michael had never before seen his father, a virtual stranger, in this light.  To his knowledge, he had never even met Matthew.  He asked him, how do you two know each other?  Frank told his son that he had known Matthew since he was very young.  He was beginning to feel creepy, nauseous.  Matthew emerged from the shower, wearing one of his “sexier” robes.  His eyes widened like Wedgewood saucers when he saw Michael, who wasn’t supposed to be back for another three days.  He replied, “I got bored.  Dean was being a silly twit, and she just can’t seem to stop complaining about everything.”  Dean had been Michael’s third romance on the sly since he’d come to live with Matthew, six months ago.  “You needn’t introduce us”, he said with affected insouciance.  “He’s my father.”

            Michael ignored the pale blue glow of the eleven o’clock news while observing the cloissanne urn on the fireplace mantel.  Matthew had specially offered this Ming Dynasty vase to contain Michael’s father’s ashes.  Apparently, his last wishes.  A beautiful piece, though Michael could never forget its contents.  His father never actually admitted to being gay, not until when he was dying.  Michael had quickly excused himself, to go throw up in the toilet.  As he listened to Matthew letting his father out the door, he bit hard into the pillow, lest they hear his bellow of outrage, grief and betrayal.  Reaching for the remote, Michael channel-surfed, then turned off the TV.  Refusing to look again at the urn, he got up and went up to bed.